V.I. Warshawski 12 Fire Sale

Nobody does physical danger and personal pain better than Paretsky, and in many ways the audio version of her 12th V.I. Warshawski mystery captures those qualities more effectively than the book. It helps considerably that Burr makes us believe almost instantly that she is the thorny Chicago private eye who has never really escaped her rough South Side roots even though she now usually works in more upscale neighborhoods. Burr catches all the vocal nuances—the tough and touching young female basketball players from V.I.'s old high school; the black cop ex-lover and the foreign correspondent seriously wounded in Afghanistan who has taken his place; and V.I.'s crotchety, well-meaning old neighbor. As Warshawski looks for a corporate sponsor for the basketball team she has agreed to coach, a flag factory explodes and its owner is killed, a young man from a giant discount store family disappears with one of the basketball players—and once again life for V.I. becomes extremely complicated, not to mention painful.
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Starred Review Long-running mystery series have a way of losing readers over time, but anyone who has drifted away from Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski should promptly return to the fold. The thirteenth Warshawski novel is one of the best, primarily because it takes V. I. back to her South Chicago roots, filling in fascinating backstory on the sleuth's evolution and effectively utilizing both the city's broad-shouldered past and its radically globalized present. V. I. returns to her old neighborhood--in the far southeast corner of Chicago--to fill in for her former high-school basketball coach, who is fighting cancer. Confronted by a dilapidated gym and a team made up mainly of gangbangers and single mothers, V. I. feels overwhelmed--for about five minutes, before she reacts with typical ferocity, driving her players and doggedly pursuing corporate funding for the team. It's the latter that takes her to By-Smart, South Chicago's main employer, run by a bigoted, born-again billionaire. Soon V. I. is caught in the middle of a Romeo and Juliet romance between the son of Mr. By-Smart and the daughter of a Latina single mother, whose employer's factory has just been destroyed by fire. Paretsky has never been better than she is here at evoking a sense of place--abandoned and rusting steel mills casting long shadows over the difficult lives of largely immigrant families. Nothing seems forced as Paretsky plays socioeconomic realities against a universal story of passion and jealousy, building the plot from the marshy ground up and allowing Chicago to muscle its way into a costarring role. Bill Ott
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